Georgia has Sparta, Athens, Rome, Cairo (pronounced “Kay-ro” by locals), Damascus, and Berlin. To make things simple, Tennessee also has Sparta, Athens, Rome, Cairo (as well as Memphis), Damascus, and Berlin.
While one doesn’t really need a “Greece” to follow “Athens” in a discussion about the Parthenon, having it there is not an indication of “dumbing down” as it is an understanding that Americans know there is, in fact, more than one “Athens”. And those of us in Tennessee know there is more than one Parthenon.
YMMV and all that, but I’ve always found most Indian restaurant food in America to be bland and limited. I much prefer eating my mom’s food, my own, or Indian food in India.
But a number of Indian dishes can take a long time to prepare, so it may be that economic factors are in play in American restaurants.
I just saw Bend It Like Beckham the other night. There were a couple of times when the British slang got so thick that the dialog was nearly unintelligible to us Americans. That’s one place where a little judicious “dumbing down” can be a good idea.
Re: Benny Hill. Remember that humor is very dependent on culture. I imagine that many of the jokes in, say, a Jay Leno monologue would fall flat for a British audience. (I was going to compare Benny Hill to Saturday Night Live, but that would imply that SNL has actual humor of some sort, which is a dubious assertion to say the least )
Most Harry Potter fans agree that the the Philosopher/Sorcerer switch was dumb, but most of the other changes have been good. For example, in one of the latter books, Ron tells Harry to “keep his pecker up.” In England, ‘pecker’ is a slang term for your nose. In America, it’s slang for penis. The publishers wisely decided to change the line to “keep a stiff upper lip.”
I wonder about this. Well, except the Benny Hill stuff - that was inexcusable. But I don’t recall incomprehensible dialog being its biggest selling point. As I recall, that show had fewer words and more breasts.
Still, my American wife (she’s from Harrisburg, PA) never has trouble with my accent. It took her a while to get used to me saying things like “Shit! That really gets on my tits!”, though. She understood the words as I pronounced them, she just couldn’t see why I’d arranged those words in that order.
When she visited me in the UK, she bought all the British Harry Potter books. She loved the fact that they were not Americanised. When she was a kid, she read British books and learned a lot about the differences in culture, language and so on.
But within the US you often do, which is something more necessary when the people conversing aren’t from the same place - say, on a message board such as this one.
Suppose I tell you that I’ve been listening to a great band that’s “From Portland,” do you suppose they’re from Maine or Oregon? I’d probably mean Maine, but if you didn’t realize that I live very close to Maine you’d likely guess the other one because I wasn’t specific and the other is much better known. Since there are so many duplicate place names like this, it’s natural to always be specific when it comes to mentioning places that potentially could become confused.
Automatics vs. manuals might have to do with local traffic conditions too. I prefer a manual, but when we moved to Silicon Valley, home of the hour±long commute, and we needed a decent car instead of the car-shaped-object we were driving, we bought an automatic to more easily deal with the constant slow stop-and-go traffic (at the time I was a sub in two different library systems and drove to a different city every week). I assume some Europeans have long, annoying commutes too, but possibly not quite as many as Americans what with all that famous public transport?
Anyway I should think that if there’s dumbing-down going on, which I’m not entirely convinced of, it’s probably due to the need to appeal to such a huge and diverse market, as well as the perception that Americans won’t get it (as in Harry Potter). Most of the American folks I know are at least as sharp as the Europeans I know, and attending a Scandinavian public school for a year as a teen cured me of the illusion that Europeans are generally smarter than Americans.
Yep. In fact, I live within 90 minutes drive of three separate places which all share the same name. And it’s got a pretty impressive Wikipedia disambiguation page. And it’s my surname. Yet somehow there’s never any confusion.
I don’t think there’s anything uniquly American about this, as Sellotape demonstrates. We use post-it, aspirin, photoshop, walkman, don’t forget about nylon and velcro, and we’ve also got others of our own, such as Hoover for vacuum cleaner and Tipp-Ex for White Out.
I don’t understand most of the examples in this thread. They seem more interested in pointing out cultural differences than in giving examples of ‘dumbing down’. I think of dumbing down as a process that occurs when one culture imports something from another. Things specific to the source culture are replaced (or over-explained) with things from the destination culture. The ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ is a great example of this.
Automatic vs. manual transmissions? How is that dumbing down? The US market was mostly manual at one time and has since changed. Can’t import cars from Thailand? Seems more like protectionism. Driving too slow in the left lane creates a need for more lanes? This one doesn’t even make sense.
Beers in America were flavorful until Prohibition. When Prohibition was lifted and only the larger breweries were left, beers were ‘watered down’ to appeal to the larger markets – markets once served by smaller, local breweries. This is certainly an example of lowest common denominator marketing, but it was self-imposed. They weren’t watered down when they were first brought to America. In any case, the beer market has changed quite a bit since the 90’s; this shows there is a significant market for other flavors.
Explaining the Louvre is in Paris, France is dumbing down, but explaining it was in Paris is not? If I mention the Mona Lisa, why should I even mention the Louvre? Isn’t that dumbing down too? How specific can I be without dumbing down? As others said, this seems more a case of being consistently specific more than anything else. Perhaps this is just the editorial policy of the paper.
Unfortunately, Americans are often culturally myopic. This is probably due to the US being a huge exporter of culture and a smaller importer. It is probably also due to the fact that there are a lot of us and even within the country there is a wide variation of exposure. Things are dumbed down and homogenized even within the country.
The ironic Benny Hill example was the best though.
Some years ago “What is the capital of Australia?” was a question on the American ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’ The contestant “asked the audience”, which overwhelmingly voted for Sydney.
Me too. I have the Hitchhiker’s Quartet to thank for, in addition to a lot of belly laughs, knowing the meaning of such arcana as Sellotape, Pot Noodle, leaving party, speaking clock, when something doesn’t make any odds, that a bath is not just something you take, but the vessel you take it in, and that not just any paved surface is a pavement. Two countries separated by etc., etc.
Cars. When I came to the US, I discovered that Honda was pulling one over on the collective populous by renaming their cars Acuras so that the well-heeled yank would think that they’re not buying a Honda. It worked. They bought Acuras (which were Hondas everywhere else) and drove around thinking they were in a car comparable to a Benz.
Nissan and Toyota jumped on that one. It still works to this day. Acura is 20. What’s wierd though is that many of the owners of the G35/G37 coupes are removing the Infinity badges and replacing them with the Nissan ones since the G35/G37 is a Nissan Skyline everywhere else in the known universe. Sort of a reverse snobbery.
Indian food. I know of a couple of good places in Maryland that will hold up against my fave local curry house in London. So that’s not dumbed down.
Soccer has been dumbed down IMO. I went to see an indoor game (MISL) and three points were scored if the ball was struck from outside of the ‘zone’. I can only imagine that is to inflate the scores to keep the Americans interested. They had cheerleaders too, some of which were, well…iffy. I guess they never made the cut for the Ravens gals
This comes across as an unkind remark, though I’m sure it’s not intended that way. I have to ask how you think our place names could have been otherwise, or what makes the US any different in this regard compared to other nations of the New World.
Or for that matter, what makes the rest of the world any different at all, when it comes to naming things. Isn’t “London” inherited from the Romans? “Londinium”? You all don’t count yourselves as Romans anymore I assume, so that’s a previously established culture you’ve stolen the name from.
European settlers in the Americas, instead of making up brand new, out-of-nowhere words like “Snurplebamf”, chose to fill in the map with names they knew from back home (Boston, Richmond, Paris), or ones that sounded like a place from home, or ones honoring famous people (Baltimore, Louisville, Pennsylvania), or local Indian names (Chicago, Dakota, Connecticut).
Seems like a perfectly sensible plan to me, and I wouldn’t have called it theft.
Bytegeist, you’re getting a trifle defensive about a clearly humourous comment. (Your point about Londinium isn’t strictly relevant, too, as it was named in situ by the Romans, not after an extant Italian city.)
My wife used to work for a company called Baltimore Technologies, named after the small village in Ireland, and one of her jobs was to field emails from the angry citizens of Baltimore, MD, getting pissed off that “their” city’s name had been misappropriated.
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